India, and the highest I've ever walked

India didn't ease me in. I spent about a month wandering Rajasthan with no fixed route, letting one town's recommendation decide the next stop — the kind of travel where the plan is that there isn't one. Delhi at night, from a rooftop over a market street lit up in string lights and neon, a Pepsi bottle sweating on the table, motorbikes threading traffic below that looked like it shouldn't work and somehow always did.

Old Delhi from above. The traffic below never actually stopped.

Standing in front of the Taj Mahal at sunrise, I didn't feel the thing you're supposed to feel at a wonder of the world so much as a kind of quiet — thousands of people over hundreds of years standing in roughly the same spot, silhouetted the same way I was, for reasons that all eventually come down to the same thing: something worth crossing a very long distance to see with your own eyes instead of a photograph.

Sunrise, and a very long line of people who felt the same pull before me.

Then Nepal, and the Annapurna Circuit — a 13-day trek with a travel companion, crossing terrain that went from subtropical villages to glacier at a pace your body doesn't really get to negotiate with. Thorong La Pass sits somewhere around 5,400 meters, close to 17,700 feet. It's the highest I have ever stood on my own two feet, before or since.

Somewhere below the pass. The scale stops making sense after a while.

Being Deaf at that altitude taught me something I couldn't have learned any other way. Cold hands aren't just uncomfortable when ASL is your language — they're a communication problem. Signing takes real physical dexterity, and when your fingers stop cooperating, thin air and altitude sickness aren't the only things making it hard to talk. I remember standing at that pass — the sign and the prayer flags at the top of this page — hands aching in the cold, and signing to my companion, slowly and deliberately because that's all my fingers had left to give, that I was standing above 99% of the entire mountain range around us. Every flag on that cairn had been carried up by someone with their own reason for being there.

I've never needed to prove anything to anyone by going higher than that. I don't think I could if I tried. Some ceilings you only get to hit once, and you're supposed to just stand there and let it be enough.